I am again sitting in the car in front of my apartment building because the car is a complete sensory environment. I can blog using only my iPhone and the stereo through voice dictation. It is completely different than sitting alone in my bedroom with my laptop. It is a nice day, and the sunshine is streaming into the windows. I am protected from the weather, but I can see everything going on and that is important to me. It is 8:55 AM and that is when the real work begins around here.
It is when the maintenance vans start their daily trek to the buildings, spilling out workers to fix leaky faucets, and doors that don’t hang right. It reminds me of my own running task list and gets me in the mood to do it. Body doubling is necessary for a neurodivergent brain. Seeing other people working reminds me to get with a program. It is honestly why I am looking for a partner or five. I do not have a preconceived idea of what my relational life looks like in the future, but what I do know is that I am tired of carrying everything alone.
I also know that my version of polyamory is so incredibly quiet and is more about future proofing than anything else. People get bored; should they lose their whole life over it? It is not a question of whether I can be in a monogamous relationship because I have proven that I can. It is a question of knowing what I will tolerate and what I won’t in the future. Kathleen devastated me by cheating on me. I devastated Dana by emotionally cheating. There are no winners here it is about taking my mistakes and preventing them in the future.
I am human, so I will never stop making mistakes. What I can do is at least make new ones. I couldn’t change anything in the past because I kept surrounding myself with people who thought I was broken. That is because I didn’t recognize that they thought I was broken and kept jumping up and down for their approval because it wasn’t a different pattern from my first family.
My mother and father never would have wanted me to feel like damaged goods, but that is what happened, anyway. Them not taking my early neurological findings seriously enough to get me childhood intervention made me feel like a problem to be dealt with and not a child. It made me feel like they were brave to have to love someone like me.
So that’s how I felt about Aada as well. She was jumping up and down trying to impress me, and it didn’t work because I thought that I had to impress her to be loved. That I couldn’t just show up as myself, I had to be both stupid hot and impressive academically. She is straight, so she would not have noticed whether I was stupid hot or not. It’s a confidence vibe, not trying to appeal to her brain specifically.
I made a lot of mistakes by not recognizing that I was wounding her by writing. That it would’ve been more productive to find a quiet space off-line and just dive into each other. Conversations needed to happen in person. Because the reality of the last 12 years is not that she is my love romantically, it’s that we are connected cognitively. That is a different fire than romance, but it burns blue and white.
Holy shit. I saw what I did there. 😎
If you didn’t, that’s between her and me. But it’s not that hard to put together if you how much I love Moomin. 💙🤍
Moomin is a specific emotional register for me because even though the author is dead, based on pattern recognition, I can tell that all of her characters are different representations of mental illnesses and neurodivergent conditions. According to AI, I am the perfect blend of Snufkin and Moomintroll.
I’ll take it, but I will also add the caveat that I am in a long-term relationship with The Groke.
The Groke is depression, clearly. But Tove never shoves her away. She doesn’t put her in a closet. She doesn’t pretend that she doesn’t exist.
My work to do as an American that identifies with these characters is to keep them around me all the time. They are not the system, but they are powerful symbols. But it’s important to know what they are powerful symbols of…….
Everyone is allowed to be themselves in a way that is fundamentally different from the American capitalistic system and it works for them. Maybe the real grant work starts when I figure out how to house Too Ticky and Little My.
I have not gotten my grade back on my topic statement and analysis, but I did email the professor before I submitted everything and asked if it looked like what he was looking for. Dr. B said that it showed significant depth, and I said something to the effect of, “this paper is not for this class, I want to change policy for real for real.”
Autistic Americans deserve all of the support that autistic Canadians get, and that inquality has bothered me since I was a freshman in college. That’s because my girlfriend went off to university in New Brunswick, and I didn’t. The relationship ending was sad, certainly, but the bigger issue was my raging jealousy at her systemic support. For instance, Canada getting gay marriage light years before we did.
Therefore, despite not having a Canadian girlfriend anymore, immigration is still interesting to me. That’s because everything I need is settled law there, and my rights come up for debate every four years here; that calculation is not hard.
I have been brutal about saying to AI that I don’t care about children because they already have people to care about them. I care about what happens on birthday 18. Everyone loves giving money to children and I think that’s wonderful but that doesn’t mean there’s not a problem when kids age out of the system. And in that way, it does not matter where you are support for Canadian children also ends, it just ends in different ways.
There is also more of a stigma around children with special needs in the United States and that fragmentation leads less people to seek services to begin with. Why would you say that you were autistic, ADHD, and had cerebral palsy if you did not need it? Yet, people constantly accuse me of making it up. This is doubly problematic when I add bipolar disorder on top of it. Because obviously my disorder is making me unbalanced, and I am saying things that I do not mean.
Meanwhile, other people’s stories about me are covering up the story that is actually there. What has happened is that I have aged. Compensation was easier when I was young and malleable but now it is not. I am in a different position now than when I was 25- not recognizing that is the key to the whole thing.
My disability didn’t go anywhere, I cannot hide it anymore.
